I do not believe it ships direct audio recording. It is analysis of the audio it processes (at least that is how I read it). Just because it sends lossy compressed data home (analysis output) instead of direct recordings does not mean it isn't listening.
It just seems really far fetched that thousands of Amazon employees are conspiring to commit an insanely obvious and illegal breach of privacy for data that isn’t even all that useful (hard to analyse, computationally expensive, low signal to noise ratio). And that no one has ever noticed this even when security researchers test these devices
Come on, the Alexa devices are designed to do what? They wake up on a keyword, perform some local analysis of the following data, and phone home on an encrypted channel on a regular basis.
You quite literally can't tell by watching one what it is doing. You certainly cannot verify that all Alexas are not doing something.
I don’t think Amazon have a vast conspiracy (that no one has whistleblown on!) of secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising. It would be difficult, require huge amounts of processing, probably not help very much, and be incredibly illegal. It wouldn’t give them much value and would be incredibly risky
